To begin with, this subject overall went (relatively) quite a bit better than education did, despite its somewhat misleading title. For recap, the subject was about when young people want to become game makers.
Rando Post No. 4: You Can Ce Whatever You Want to Be*
I forgot to mention how there are reasons other than parents implying otherwise that this isn’t true. For instance, I used to want to be a fighter pilot, thanks to Ace Combat 5.
Last week, I wrote about how children shouldn’t be discouraged from getting involved in making games when the popular opinion is that they shouldn’t, and how people shouldn’t actively discourage them. However, some people would find this a rather naive argument. So, here I consider their side.
It’s alright for a kid to try it out, but not every kid who does is really cut out for making games. In fact, most of the time, they aren’t.
Last week, I ended by asking you to remember a certain statistic – that the future career of “game designer” is among the top three choices among children aged 8 to 10, as reported by this article. This week, I plan to talk a little bit more about that specifically, and how it drops off the chart afterwards.
Many children play video games [citation needed]. At some point, a fairly large number of them want to make some of their own, primarily when they are between ages 8 and 10, as stated before. However, most of the time, they find other things that they find that they would rather do.
As an aspiring game developer, I value the importance of dreaming big when it comes to what one wants to do with his/her life. I value doing whatever it takes (within reason, and legal) to achieve long-term goals. But there is a caveat to all of this that adults don’t tend to consider when relaying this to children. Hints: the parentheses earlier, and the asterisk in the title.
This topic came to me when I saw this Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic. As a little tangent, you may be seeing that publication referenced quite a bit here at CWG.
This is the first follow-up article for the Rando series. In these follow-up posts, I will look back on the previous posts, try to clarify anything that I didn’t convey clearly, talk about any new information on them, or anything else that must be said. I will also touch on a few topics that I didn’t write about before because I only do three posts per unit, or they didn’t come to my attention until after I had already chosen the three main points for the subject. Finally, I will share some thoughts on the subject as a whole. After that will be any brief news, and the announcement of the next subject.
So, the topic of this subject was how technology and games can affect education.
The reason for the weird title is that I’m not really sure what to call these, so I think a better way to convey what I mean would be: remember Junior Achievement®, where you would repeatedly “learn” about the assembly line by lining up with the rest of your classmates to glue pieces of paper together?
Okay, so that may be putting J.A.(fun fact – technically still ®) in a bad light, so I’ll admit that I liked it because it was a part of the school day where I could just put my brain on autopilot. Also, that’s not the only thing that I’m going to talk about in this one. And, to be fair, my last rando post was about how great gamification could be for education, so their attempts to make learning about the “real world” (as opposed to the “fake world” that students apparently live in until they graduate from college) interactive and fun are commendable. But, as with this toast, I’m done buttering it up.
There are a few examples of what I’m going to be talking about here
A few weeks ago, I complained about e-learning days. I had another one a few days later. It was also horrible. But, as it did last time, my Econ homework was nice.
I’m going to take a moment to complain about school. If you don’t want to hear about it, you don’t have to read it.
As you know, I’m still in high school. (I’m a senior, which means I’m almost done, though.) My school is taking advantage of these modern times. We have a 1 on 1 netbook deal, where every student has a school-issued netbook. This year, the school initiated a new program – the e-learning day.